In a television broadcast medium, ratings of shows (proximate number of viewers) presents a determination of how to value advertisements that are associated with a given show. A determination is made as to approximately how many people will be viewing an advertisement. This correlates to how to value the time slot for an advertisement.
In the digital communications market where advertisements are delivered with digital content, there does not exist such a valuation system. It can be easily determined if a person has received an advertisement associated with digital content just by the recordation of the digital content transmission. This would apparently be easy to measure on a one time download basis, but cannot measure how many times a user may view the particular advertisement or whether other people are viewing the advertisement due to the fact that the recipient forwards the digital content with the associated advertisement to another user.
Therefore, there exists a need for more effectively evaluating viewership of advertisements associated with digital content over nontraditional delivery means.